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THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 



THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 



BY 

ARNOLD BENNETT 

Author of "Literary Taste," "How to Live on 

24 Hours a Day," "The Human Machine," 

"Mental Efficiency," Etc., Etc. 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



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?Ni45 
.B4-3. 



Copyright, 1 91 4 
By George H. Doran Company 



AUGI9I9!4 @C|A379168 



CONTENTS 

PART I Page 

Seeing Life 9 

« 

PART II 
Writing Novels 39 

PART III 
Writing Plays .69 

PART IV 
The Artist an( * the Public ..... 99 



PART I 
SEEING LIFE 



PART I 

SEEING LIFE 

I 

A YOUNG dog, inexperienced, sadly 
lacking in even primary education, 
ambles and frisks along the foot- 
path of Fulham Road, near the mysterious 
gates of a Marist convent. He is a large 
puppy, on the way to be a dog of much dignity, 
but at present he has little to recommend him 
but that gawky elegance, and that bounding 
gratitude for the gift of life, which distinguish 
the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. 
He might have entered the convent of nuns and 
had a fine time, but instead he steps off the 
pavement into the road, the road being a vast 
and interesting continent imperfectly explored. 
His confidence in his nose, in his agility, and 
in the goodness of God is touching, absolutely 
9 



io THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

painful to witness. He glances casually at a 
huge, towering vermilion construction that is 
whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded 
by a glint of brass and a wisp of steam; and 
then with disdain he ignores it as less im- 
portant than a mere speck of odorous matter in 
the mud. The next instant he is lying inert in 
the mud. His confidence in the goodness of 
God had been misplaced. Since the beginning 
of time God had ordained him a victim. 

An impressive thing happens. The motor- 
bus reluctantly slackens and stops. Not the 
differential brake, nor the footbrake, has ar- 
rested the motor-bus, but the invisible brake 
of public opinion, acting by administrative 
transmission. There is not a policeman in 
sight. Theoretically, the motor-bus is free to 
whiz onward in its flight to the paradise of 
Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by 
dread. A man in brass buttons and a stylish 
cap leaps down from it, and the blackened 
demon who sits on its neck also leaps down 
from it, and they move gingerly towards the 
puppy. A little while ago the motor-bus might 



SEEING LIFE n 

have overturned a human cyclist or so, and 
proceeded nonchalant on its way. But now 
even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such is 
the force of public opinion aroused. Two 
policemen appear in the distance. 

" A street accident " is now in being, and a 
crowd gathers with calm joy and stares, pas- 
sive and determined. The puppy offers no 
sign whatever; just lies in the road. Then a 
boy, destined probably to a great future by 
reason of his singular faculty of initiative, goes 
to the puppy and carries him by the scruff of 
the neck, to the shelter of the gutter. Relin- 
quished by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into 
an easy horizontal attitude, and seems bent 
upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's head 
to examine it, and the head drops back wearily. 
The puppy is dead. No cry, no blood, no 
disfigurement! Even no perceptible jolt of 
the wheel as it climbed over the obstacle of the 
puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and per- 
fect accident! 

The increasing crowd stares with beatific 
placidity. People emerge impatiently from 



12 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip 
down from its back, and either join the crowd 
or vanish. The two policemen and the crew of 
the motor-bus have now met in parley. The 
conductor and the driver have an air at once 
nervous and resigned ; their gestures are quick 
and vivacious. The policemen, on the other 
hand, indicate by their slow and huge move- 
ments that eternity is theirs. And they could 
not be more sure of the conductor and the 
driver if they had them manacled and leashed. 
The conductor and the driver admit the abso- 
lute dominion of the elephantine policemen; 
they admit that before the simple will of the 
policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, short- 
ened leisure, docked wages, count as less than 
naught. And the policemen are carelessly sub- 
lime, well knowing that magistrates, jails, and 
the very Home Secretary on his throne — yes, 
and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury 
and brutality — are at their beck in case of 
need. And yet occasionally in the demeanour 
of the policemen towards the conductor and 
the driver there is a silent message that says: 



SEEING LIFE 13 

" After all, we, too, are working men like you, 
over-worked and under-paid and bursting with 
grievances in the service of the pitiless and dis- 
honest public. We, too, have wives and chil- 
dren and privations and frightful apprehen- 
sions. We, too, have to struggle desperately. 
Only the awful magic of these garments and of 
the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an 
abyss between us and you." And the conduc- 
tor writes and one of the policemen writes, and 
they keep on writing while the traffic makes 
beautiful curves to avoid them. 

The still increasing crowd continues to stare 
in the pure blankness of pleasure. A close- 
shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a 
copy of The Sportsman in his podgy hand, who 
has descended from the motor-bus, starts 
stamping his feet. " I was knocked down by a 
taxi last year," he says fiercely. " But nobody 
took no notice of that ! Are they going to stop 
here all the blank morning for a blank tyke? " 
And for all his respectable appearance, his 
features become debased, and he emits a jet of 
disgusting profanity and brings most of the 



i 4 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

Trinity into the thunderous assertion that he 
has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling 
a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long 
time with the other uniforms, because he, too, 
wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd 
never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the 
new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed, 
masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and 
yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and 
passes on. And only that which is immortal 
and divine of the puppy remains behind, float- 
ing perhaps like an invisible vapour over the 
scene of the tragedy. 

The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four 
principals still converse and write. Nobody 
in the crowd comprehends what they are about. 
At length the driver separates himself, but is 
drawn back, and a new parley is commenced. 
But everything ends. The policemen turn on 
their immense heels. The driver and conduc- 
tor race towards the motor-bus. The bell 
rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears 
snorting round the corner into Walham Green. 



SEEING LIFE 15 

The crowd is now lessening. But it separates 
with reluctance, many of its members continu- 
ing to stare with intense absorption at the place 
where the puppy lay or the place where the 
policemen stood. An appreciable interval 
elapses before the " street accident " has en- 
tirely ceased to exist as a "phenomenon. 

The members of the crowd follow their 
noses, and during the course of the day remark 
to acquaintances: 

" Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the 
Fulham Road this morning ! Killed dead ! " 

And that is all they do remark. That is all 
they have witnessed. They will not, and could 
not, give intelligible and interesting partic- 
ulars of the affair (unless it were as to the 
breed of the dog or the number of the bus- 
service). They have watched a dog run over. 
They analyse neither their sensations nor the 
phenomenon. They have witnessed it whole, 
as a bad writer uses a cliche. They have ob- 
served — that is to say, they have really seen 
— nothing. 



16 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

II 

It will be well for us not to assume an atti- 
tude of condescension towards the crowd. Be- 
cause in the matter of looking without seeing 
we are all about equal. We all go to and fro 
in a state of the observing faculties which 
somewhat resembles coma. We are all con- 
tent to look and not see. 

And if and when, having comprehended that 
the role of observer is not passive but active, 
we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves 
from the coma and really to see the spectacle 
of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses 
and even street accidents in sustained dramatic 
interest), we shall discover, slowly in the 
course of time, that the act of seeing, which 
seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let 
a man resolve : " I will keep my eyes open on 
the way to the office of a morning," and the 
probability is that for many mornings he will 
see naught that is not trivial, and that his sys- 
tem of perspective will be absurdly distorted. 
The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly 



SEEING LIFE 17 

attract him, to the exclusion of what is funda- 
mental and universal. Travel makes observers 
of us all, but the things which as travellers we 
observe generally show how unskilled we are 
in the new activity. 

A man went to Paris for the first time, and 
observed right off that the carriages of sub- 
urban trains had seats on the roof like a tram- 
car. He was so thrilled by the remarkable 
discovery that he observed almost nothing 
else. This enormous fact occupied the whole 
foreground of his perspective. He returned 
home and announced that Paris was a place 
where people rode on the tops of trains. A 
Frenchwoman came to London for the first 
time — and no English person would ever 
guess the phenomenon which vanquished all 
others in her mind on the opening day. She 
saw a cat walking across a street. The vision 
excited her. For in Paris cats do not roam in 
thoroughfares, because there are practically no 
houses with gardens or " areas " ; the flat sys- 
tem is unfavourable to the enlargement of cats. 
I remember once, in the days when observation 



18 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

had first presented itself to me as a beautiful 
pastime, getting up very early and making the 
circuit of inner London before summer dawn 
in quest of interesting material. And the one 
note I gathered was that the ground in front of 
the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg- 
shells ! What I needed then was an operation 
for cataract. I also remember taking a man to 
the opera who had never seen an opera. The 
work was Lohengrin. When we came out he 
said : " That swan's neck was rather stiff." 
And it was all he did say. We went and had 
a drink. He was not mistaken. His observa- 
tion was most just; but his perspective was 
that of those literary critics who give ten lines 
to pointing out three slips of syntax, and three 
lines to an ungrammatical admission that the 
novel under survey is not wholly tedious. 

But a man may acquire the ability to ob- 
serve even a large number of facts, and still re- 
main in the infantile stage of observation. I 
have read, in some work of literary criticism, 
that Dickens could walk up one side of a long, 
busy street and down the other, and then tell 



SEEING LIFE 19 

you in their order the names on all the shop- 
signs; the fact was alleged as an illustration 
of his great powers of observation. Dickens 
was a great observer, but he would assuredly 
have been a still greater observer had he been 
a little less pre-occupied with trivial and unco- 
ordinated details. Good observation consists v^ 
not in multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordina- 
tion of detail according to a true perspective of 
relative importance, so that a finally just gen- 
eral impression may be reached in the shortest 
possible time. The skilled observer is he who 
does not have to change his mind. One has 
only to compare one's present adjusted impres- 
sion of an intimate friend with one's first im- 
pression of him to perceive the astounding 
inadequacy of one's powers of observation. 
The man as one has learnt to see him is simply 
not the same man who walked into one's draw- 
ing-room on the day of introduction. 

There are, by the way, three sorts of created 
beings who are sentimentally supposed to be 
able to judge individuals at the first glance: 
women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a 



20 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

mystic gift with which rumour credits them, 
they are never mistaken. It is merely not true. 
Women are constantly quite wrong in the esti- 
mates based on their " feminine instinct " ; 
they sometimes even admit it; and the matri- 
monial courts prove it passim. Children are 
more often wrong than women. And as for 
dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever be- 
ing taken in by plausible scoundrels; the per- 
spective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom 
have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion 
of deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimen- 
tal legend of the infallibility of women, chil- 
dren, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon 
countries. 

Ill 

One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: 
therefore one watches them. And generally 
the more intelligent one is, the more curious 
one is, and the more one observes. The mere 
satisfaction of this curiosity is in itself a worthy 
end, and would alone justify the business of 
systematised observation. But the aim of ob- 



. SEEING LIFE 21 

servation may, and should, be expressed in 
terms more grandiose. Human curiosity 
counts among the highest social virtues (as 
indifference counts among the basest defects), 
because it leads to the disclosure of the causes 
of character and temperament and thereby to a 
better understanding of the springs of human 
conduct. Observation is not practised directly 
with this high end in view (save by prigs and 
other futile souls) ; nevertheless it is a moral 
act and must inevitably promote kindliness — 
whether we like it or not. It also sharpens the 
sense of beauty. An ugly deed — such as a 
deed of cruelty — takes on artistic beauty when 
its origin and hence its fitness in the general 
scheme begin to be comprehended. In the 
perspective of history we can derive an aes- 
thetic pleasure from the tranquil scrutiny of 
all kinds of conduct ■ — as well, for example, of 
a Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola. Ob- 
servation endows our day and our street with 
the romantic charm of history, and stimulates 
charity — not the charity which signs cheques, 
but the more precious charity which puts itself 



22 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

to the trouble of understanding. The one con- 
dition is that the observer must never lose sight 
of the fact that what he is trying to see is life, 
is the woman next door, is the man in the train 
— and not a concourse of abstractions. To ap- 
preciate all this is the first inspiring prelimin- 
ary to sound observation. 

IV 

The second preliminary is to realise that 
all physical phenomena are interrelated, that 
there is nothing which does not bear 
on everything else. The whole spectac- 
ular and sensual show — what the eye sees, 
the ear hears, the nose scents, the tongue 
tastes and the skin touches — is a cause or an 
effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled 
out as negligible, as not forming part of the 
equation. Hence he who would beyond all 
others see life for himself — I naturally mean 
the novelist and playwright — ought to em- 
brace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being 
finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But 
he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the 



• SEEING LIFE 23 

whole, determine with some accuracy the posi- 
tion and relative importance of the particular 
series of phenomena to which his instinct draws 
him. If he does not thus envisage the immense 
background of his special interests, he will lose 
the most precious feeling for interplay and pro- 
portion without which all specialism becomes 
distorted and positively darkened. 

Now, the main factor in life on this planet 
is the planet itself. Any logically conceived 
survey of existence must begin with geo- 
graphical and climatic phenomena. This is 
surely obvious. If you say that you are not in- 
terested in meteorology or the configurations 
of the earth, I say that you deceive yourself. 
You are. For an east wind may upset your 
liver and cause you to insult your wife. Be- 
yond question the most important fact about, 
for example, Great Britain is that it is an is- 
land. We sail amid the Hebrides, and then 
talk of the fine qualities and the distressing 
limitations of those islanders ; it ought to occur 
to us English that we are talking of ourselves 
in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory 



24 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

we are apt to refer to the " sturdy island race," 
meaning us. But that we are insular in the 
full significance of the horrid word is certain. 
Why not? A genuine observation of the su- 
preme phenomenon that Great Britain is sur- 
rounded by water — an effort to keep it always 
at the back of the consciousness — will help to 
explain all the minor phenomena of British 
existence. Geographical knowledge is the 
mother of discernment, for the varying physical 
characteristics of the earth are the sole direct 
terrestrial influence determining the evolution 
of original vital energy. 

All other influences are secondary, and have 
been effects of character and temperament be- 
fore becoming causes. Perhaps the greatest of 
them are roads and architecture. Nothing 
could be more English than English roads, or 
more French than French roads. Enter Eng- 
land from France, let us say through the gate 
of Folkestone, and the architectural illustration 
which greets you (if you can look and see) is 
absolutely dramatic in its spectacular force. 
You say that there is no architecture in Folke- 



SEEING LIFE 25 

stone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just 
as full of architecture as a wood is full of trees. 
As the train winds on its causeway over the 
sloping town you perceive below you thou- 
sands of squat little homes, neat, tended, re- 
spectable, comfortable, prim, at once unosten- 
tatious and conceited. Each a separate, 
clearly-defined entity! Each saying to the 
others : " Don't look over my wall, and I 
won't look over yours!" Each with a fero- 
cious jealousy bent on guarding its own indi- 
viduality! Each a stronghold — an island! 
And all careless of the general effect, but mak- 
ing a very impressive general effect. The 
English race is below you. Your own son is 
below you insisting on the inviolability of his 
own den of a bedroom! . . . And contrast all 
that with the immense communistic and splen- 
did fagades of a French town, and work out 
the implications. If you really intend to see 
life you cannot afford to be blind to such thrill- 
ing phenomena. 

Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity 
would be capable of walking through 



26 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

a French street and through an English 
street, and noting chiefly that whereas 
English lamp-posts spring from the kerb, 
French lamp-posts cling to the side of the 
house ! Not that that detail is not worth not- 
ing. It is — in its place. French lamp-posts 
are part of what we call the " interesting char- 
acter " of a French street. We say of a French 
street that it is " full of character." As if an 
English street was not! Such is blindness — 
to be cured by travel and the exercise of the 
logical faculty, most properly termed common 
sense. If one is struck by the magnificence of 
the great towns of the Continent, one should 
ratiocinate, and conclude that a major charac- 
teristic of the great towns of England is their 
shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It 
is so. But there are people who have lived 
fifty years in Manchester, Leeds, Hull and 
Hanley without noticing it. The English idio- 
syncrasy is in that awful external slovenliness 
too, causing it, and being caused by it. Every 
street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, 
an explanation, of the human beings who live 



SEEING LIFE 27 

in it. Nothing in it is to be neglected. Every- 
thing in it is valuable, if the perspective is 
maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow indi- 
vidualistic novels of English literature — and 
in some of the best — you will find a domestic 
organism described as though it existed in a 
vacuum, or in the Sahara, or between Heaven 
and earth ; as though it reacted on nothing and 
was reacted on by nothing; and as though it 
could be adequately rendered without reference 
to anything exterior to itself. How can such 
novels satisfy a reader who has acquired or 
wants to acquire the faculty of seeing life? 

V 

The net result of the interplay of instincts 
and influences which determine the exist- 
ence of a community is shown in the gen- 
eral expression on the faces of the people. 
This is an index which cannot lie and 
cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and 
extremely interesting, to decipher. It is so 
open, shameless, and universal, that not to look 
at it is impossible. Yet the majority of per- 



28 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

sons fail to see it. We hear of inquirers stand- 
ing on London Bridge and counting the num- 
ber of motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, 
and white horses that pass over the bridge in 
an hour. But we never hear of anybody count- 
ing the number of faces happy or unhappy, 
honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind 
or cruel, that pass over the bridge. Perhaps 
the public may be surprised to hear that the 
general expression on the faces of Londoners 
of all ranks varies from the sad to the morose ; 
and that their general mien is one of haste 
and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring 
fact is paramount in sociological evidence. 
And the observer of it would be justified in 
summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county 
council, the churches, and the ruling classes, 
and saying to them : " Glance at these faces, 
and don't boast too much about what you have 
accomplished. The climate and the industrial 
system have so far triumphed over you all." 

VI 
When we come to the observing of the in- 
dividual — to which all human observing does 



SEEING LIFE 29 

finally come if there is any right reason in it ■ — 
the aforesaid general considerations ought to be 
ever present in the hinterland of the conscious- 
ness, aiding and influencing, perhaps vaguely, 
perhaps almost imperceptibly, the formation of 
judgments. If they do nothing else, they will 
at any rate accustom the observer to the 
highly important idea of the correlation of all 
phenomena. Especially in England a hap- 
hazard particularity is the chief vitiating ele- 
ment in the operations of the mind. 

In estimating the individual we are apt not 
only to forget his environment, but — really 
strange ! - — to ignore much of the evidence vis- 
ible in the individual himself. The inexperi- 
enced and ardent observer, will, for example, be 
astonishingly blind to everything in an indi- 
vidual except his face. Telling himself that 
the face must be the reflection of the soul, and 
that every thought and emotion leaves inevi- 
tably its mark there, he will concentrate on the 
face, singling it out as a phenomenon apart and 
self-complete. Were he a god and infallible, he 
could no doubt learn the whole truth from the 



3 o THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

face. But he is bound to fall into errors, and 
by limiting the field of vision he minimises the 
opportunity for correction. The face is, after 
all, quite a small part of the individual's phys- 
ical organism. An Englishman will look at a 
woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman 
or a plain woman. But a woman may have a 
plain face, and yet by her form be entitled to be 
called beautiful, and (perhaps) vice versa. It 
is true that the face is the reflexion of the soul. 
It is equally true that the carriage and gestures 
are the reflection of the soul. Had one eyes, 
the tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the 
soul. One piece of evidence can be used to 
correct every other piece of evidence. A re- 
fined face may be refuted by clumsy finger- 
ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the 
gait may nullify the smile. None of the phe- 
nomena which every individual carelessly and 
brazenly displays in every motor-bus terroris- 
ing the streets of London is meaningless or 
negligible. 

Again, in observing we are generally guilty 
of that particularity which results from slug- 



SEEING LIFE 31 

gishness of the imagination. We may see the 
phenomenon at the moment of looking at it, 
but we particularise in that moment, making no 
effort to conceive what the phenomenon is 
likely to be at other moments. 

For example, a male human creature wakes 
up in the morning and rises with reluctance. 
Being a big man, and existing with his wife and 
children in a very confined space, he has to 
adapt himself to his environment as he goes 
through the various functions incident to pre- 
paring for his day's work. He is just like you 
or me. He wants his breakfast, he very much 
wants to know where his boots are, and he 
has the usually sinister preoccupations about 
health and finance. Whatever the force of his 
egoism, he must more or less harmonise his 
individuality with those of his wife and chil- 
dren. Having laid down the law, or accepted 
it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a frac- 
tion of a minute late. He arrives at his office, 
resumes life with his colleagues sympathetic 
and antipathetic, and then leaves the office for 
an expedition extending over several hours. 



32 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

In the course of his expedition he encounters 
the corpse of a young dog run down by a 
motor-bus. Now you also have encountered 
that corpse and are gazing at it; and what do 
you say to yourself when he comes along? 
You say : " Oh ! Here's a policeman." For 
he happens to be a policeman. You stare at 
him, and you never see anything but a police- 
man- — an indivisible phenomenon of blue 
cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and 
a helmet ; " a stalwart guardian of the law " ; 
to you little more human than an algebraic 
symbol: in a word — a policeman. 

Only, that word actually conveys almost 
nothing to you of the reality which it stands 
for. You are satisfied with it as you are satis- 
fied with the description of a disease. A friend 
tells you his eyesight is failing. You sympa- 
thise. " What is it? " you ask. " Glaucoma." 
" Ah ! Glaucoma ! " You don't know what 
glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you were 
before. But you are content. A name has 
contented you. Similarly the name of police- 
man contents you, seems to absolve you from 



SEEING LIFE 33 

further curiosity as to the phenomenon. You 
have looked at tens of thousands of policemen, 
and perhaps never seen the hundredth part of 
the reality of a single one. Your imagination 
has not truly worked on the phenomenon. 

There may be some excuse for not seeing the 
reality of a policeman, because a uniform is al- 
ways a thick veil. But you — I mean you, I, 
any of us — are oddly dim-sighted also in re- 
gard to the civil population. For instance, we 
get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the 
scene of the street accident, and examine the 
men and women who gradually fill it. Prob- 
ably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in 
the spectacle of life. All the persons in the 
motor-bus have come out of a past and are 
moving towards a future. But how often does 
our imagination put itself to the trouble of 
realising this? We may observe with some 
care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of atti- 
tude we are observing not the human individ- 
uals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass 
their whole lives in motor-buses, who exist only 
in motor-buses and only in the present! No 



34 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

human phenomenon is adequately seen until 
the imagination has placed it back into its past 
and forward into its future. And this is the 
final process of observation of the individual. 

VII 
Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not 
begin with seeing the individual. Neither does 
it end with seeing the individual. Particular 
and unsystematised observation cannot go on 
for ever, aimless, formless. Just as individuals 
are singled out from systems, in the earlier 
process of observation, so in the later processes 
individuals will be formed into new groups, 
which formation will depend upon the personal 
bent of the observer. The predominant inter- 
ests of the observer will ultimately direct his 
observing activities to their own advantage. If 
he is excited by the phenomena of organisation 
— as I happen to be — he will see individuals 
in new groups that are the result of organisa- 
tion, and will insist on the variations from type 
due to that grouping. If he is convinced — 
as numbers of people appear to be — that so- 



SEEING LIFE 35 

ciety is just now in an extremely critical pass, 
and that if something mysterious is not forth- 
with done the structure of it will crumble to 
atoms — he will see mankind grouped under 
the different reforms which, according to him, 
the human dilemma demands. And so on! 
These tendencies, while they should not be re- 
sisted too much, since they give character to 
observation and redeem it from the frigidity of 
mechanics, should be resisted to a certain ex- 
tent. For, whatever they may be, they favour 
the growth of sentimentality, the protean and 
indescribably subtle enemy of common sense. 



PART II 
WRITING NOVELS 



PART II 

WRITING NOVELS 

I 

THE novelist is he who, having seen 
life, and being so excited by it that he 
absolutely must transmit the vision to 
others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest 
vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is like 
other artists — he cannot remain silent ; he can- 
not keep himself to himself, he is bursting with 
the news ; he is bound to tell — the affair is too 
thrilling! Only he differs from most artists 
in this — that what most chiefly strikes him is 
the indefinable humanness of human nature, 
the large general manner of existing. Of 
course, he is the result of evolution from the 
primitive. And you can see primitive novelists 
to this day transmitting to acquaintances their 
fragmentary and crude visions of life in the 
cafe or the club, or on the kerbstone. They 
39 



40 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

belong to the lowest circle of artists ; but they 
are artists ; and the form that they adopt is the 
very basis of the novel. By innumerable en- 
tertaining steps from them you may ascend to 
the major artist whose vision of life, inclusive, 
intricate and intense, requires for its due trans- 
mission the great traditional form of the novel 
as perfected by the masters of a long age which 
has temporarily set the novel higher than any 
other art-form. 

I would not argue that the novel should be 
counted supreme among the great traditional 
forms of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I 
do not much care which it is. I have in turn 
been convinced that Chartres Cathedral, certain 
Greek sculpture, Mozart's Don Juan, and the 
juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest 
thing in the world — not to mention the 
achievements of Shakespeare or Nijinsky. But 
there is something to be said for the real pre- 
eminence of prose fiction as a literary form. 
(Even the modern epic has learnt almost all it 
knows from prose-fiction.) The novel has, and 
always will have, the advantage of its compre- 



WRITING NOVELS 41 

hensive bigness. St.. Peter's at Rome is a 
trifle compared with Tolstoi's War and Peace ; 
and it is as certain as anything can be that, dur- 
ing the present geological epoch at any rate, 
no epic half as long as War and Peace will ever 
be read, even if written. 

Notoriously the novelist (including the play- 
wright, who is a sub-novelist) has been taking 
the bread out of the mouths of other artists. 
In the matter of poaching, the painter has done 
a lot, and the composer has done more, but 
what the painter and the composer have done 
is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of 
the novelist. And whereas the painter and 
the composer have got into difficulties with 
their audacious schemes, the novelist has 
poached, colonised, and annexed with a success 
that is not denied. There is scarcely any as- 
pect of the interestingness of life which is not 
now rendered in prose fiction — from land- 
scape-painting to sociology — and none which 
might not be. Unnecessary to go back to the 
ante-Scott age in order to perceive how the 
novel has aggrandised itself ! It has conquered 



42 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

enormous territories even since Germinal. 
Within the last fifteen years it has gained. 
Were it to adopt the hue of the British Em- 
pire, the entire map of the universe would soon 
be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand 
in the hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no 
rival at the present day as a means for trans- 
mitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, 
and will be for some time to come, the form to 
which the artist with the most inclusive vision 
instinctively turns, because it is the most in- 
clusive form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, 
before we are much older, if its present rate of 
progress continues, it will have reoccupied the 
dazzling position to which the mighty Balzac 
lifted it, and in which he left it in 1850. So 
much, by the way, for the rank of the novel. 

II 

In considering the equipment of the novel- 
ist there are two attributes which may al- 
ways be taken for granted. The first is 
the sense of beauty — indispensable to the cre- 
ative artist. Every creative artist has it, in 



WRITING NOVELS 43 

his degree. He is an artist because he has it. 
An artist works under the stress of instinct. 
No man's instinct can draw him towards ma- 
terial which repels him — the fact is obvious. 
Obviously, whatever kind of life the novelist 
writes about, he has been charmed and se- 
duced by it, he is under its spell — that is, he 
has seen beauty in it. He could have no other 
reason for writing about it. He may see a 
strange sort of beauty; he may — indeed he 
does — see a sort of beauty that nobody has 
quite seen before ; he may see a sort of beauty 
that none save a few odd spirits ever will or 
can be made to see. But he does see beauty. 
To say, after reading a novel which has held 
you, that the author has no sense of beauty, is 
inept. (The mere fact that you turned over 
his pages with interest is an answer to the criti- 
cism — a criticism, indeed, which is not more 
sagacious than that of the reviewer who re- 
marks : " Mr. Blank has produced a thrilling 
novel, but unfortunately he cannot write." 
Mr. Blank has written ; and he could, anyhow, 
write enough to thrill the reviewer.) All that 



44 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

a wise person will assert is that an artist's sense 
of beauty is different for the time being from 
his own. 

The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty 
has been brought against nearly all original 
novelists ; it is seldom brought against a medi- 
ocre novelist. Even in the extreme cases it 
is untrue ; perhaps it is most untrue in the ex- 
treme cases. I do not mean such a case as that 
of Zola, who never went to extremes. I mean, 
for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who, it 
is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered 
beauty in forms of existence which hitherto no 
artist had deigned seriously to examine. And 
I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. 
Possibly no works have been more abused for 
ugliness than Huysman's novel En Menage 
and his book of descriptive essays De Tout. 
Both reproduce with exasperation what is gen- 
erally regarded as the sordid ugliness of com- 
monplace daily life. Yet both exercise a 
unique charm (and will surely be read when 
La Cathedrale is forgotten). And it is incon- 
ceivable that Huysmans — whatever he may 



WRITING NOVELS 45 

have said — was not ravished by the secret 
beauty of his subjects and did not exult in 
it. 

The other attribute which may be taken for 
granted in the novelist, as in every artist, is 
passionate intensity of vision. Unless the 
vision is passionately intense the artist will not 
be moved to transmit it. He will not be incon- 
venienced by it; and the motive to pass it on 
will thus not exist. Every fine emotion pro- 
duced in the reader has been, and must have 
been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far 
greater degree. It is not altogether uncom- 
mon to hear a reader whose heart has been 
desolated by the poignancy of a narrative com- 
plain that the writer is unemotional. Such 
people have no notion at all of the processes 
of artistic creation. 

Ill 

A sense of beauty and a passionate in- 
tensity of vision being taken for granted, 
the one other important attribute in the 
equipment of the novelist in the attribute 



46 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

which indeed by itself practically suffices, and 
whose absence renders futile all the rest — 
is fineness of mind. A great novelist must 
have great qualities of mind. His mind 
must be sympathetic, quickly responsive, 
courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just, 
merciful. He must be able to conceive the 
ideal without losing sight of the fact that it is 
a human world we live in. Above all, his mind 
must be permeated and controlled by common 
sense His mind, in a word, must have the 
quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all 
this, he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reck- 
oned supreme. That which counts, on every 
page, and all the time, is the very texture of 
his mind — the glass through which he sees 
things. Every other attribute is secondary, 
and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled 
among English novelists because the broad no- 
bility of his mind is unequalled. He is read 
with unreserved enthusiasm because the 
reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in 
close contact with a glorious personality. 
And no advance in technique among later 



WRITING NOVELS 47 

novelists can possibly imperil his position. 
He will take second place when a more noble 
mind, a more superb common sense, happens 
to wield the narrative pen, and not before. 
What undermines the renown of Dickens is 
the growing conviction that the texture of his 
mind was common, that he fell short in 
courageous facing of the truth, and in certain 
delicacies of perception. As much may be said 
of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat in- 
complete for so grandiose a figure, and not free 
from defects which are inimical to immor- 
tality. 

It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger 
in any country whose artists have shown con- 
tempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, 
as the years pass, I attach less and less impor- 
tance to good technique in fiction. I love it, 
and I have fought for a better recognition of 
its importance in England, but I now have to 
admit that the modern history of fiction will 
not support me. With the single exception of 
Turgenev, the great novelists of the world, ac- 
cording to my own standards, have either ig- 



48 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

nored technique or have failed to understand 
it. What an error to suppose that the finest 
foreign novels show a better sense of form 
than the finest English novels! Balzac was a 
prodigious blunderer. He could not even man- 
age a sentence, not to speak of the general 
form of a book. And as for a greater than 
Balzac — Stendhal — his scorn of technique 
was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writ- 
ing, in a masterpiece : " By the way I ought 
to have told you earlier that the 

Duchess !" And as for a greater than 

either Balzac or Stendhal — Dostoievsky — 
what a hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the 
sublime, the unapproachable Brothers Kara- 
mazovl Any tutor in a college for teaching 
the whole art of fiction by post in twelve 
lessons could show where Dostoievsky was 
clumsy and careless. What would have been 
Flaubert's detailed criticism of that book? 
And what would it matter? And, to take a 
minor example, witness the comically amateur- 
ish technique of the late " Mark Rutherford " 



WRITING NOVELS 49 

— nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply 
admire. 

And when we come to consider the great 
technicians, Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert, 
can we say that their technique will save them, 
or atone in the slightest degree for the defects 
of their minds ? Exceptional artists both, they 
are both now inevitably falling in esteem to 
the level of the second-rate. Human nature 
being what it is, and de Maupassant being 
tinged with eroticism* his work is sure to be 
read with interest by mankind; but he is al- 
ready classed. Nobody, now, despite all his 
brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de 
Maupassant with the first magnitudes. And 
the declension of Flaubert is one of the out- 
standing phenomena of modern French criti- 
cism. It is being discovered that Flaubert's 
mind was not quite noble enough — that, in- 
deed, it was a cruel mind, and a little anaemic. 
Bouvard et Pecuchet was the crowning proof 
that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness 
of the world, and suffered from the delusion 



50 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

that he had been born on the wrong planet. 
The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and 
fools even count it against him. In regard to 
one section of human activity only did his 
mind seem noble — namely, literary technique. 
His correspondence, written, of course, cur- 
rently, was largely occupied with the question 
of literary technique, and his correspondence 
stands forth to-day as his best work — a mar- 
vellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. 
So I return to the point that the novelist's one 
important attribute (beyond the two postu- 
lated) is fundamental quality of mind. It and 
nothing else makes both the friends and the 
enemies which he has; while the influence of 
technique is slight and transitory. And I re- 
peat that it is a hard saying. 

I begin to think that great writers of fiction 
are by the mysterious nature of their art or- 
dained to be "amateurs.'' There may be 
something of the amateur in all great artists. 
I do not know why it should be so, unless be- 
cause, in the exuberance of their sense of 
power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of 



WRITING NOVELS 51 

systematic study and the mere bother of re- 
peated attempts to arrive at a minor perfec- 
tion. Assuredly no great artist was ever a pro- 
found scholar. The great artist has other ends 
to achieve. And every artist, major and 
minor, is aware in his conscience that art is 
full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed 
rapidly with the affair of creation, and an ex- 
cusable dislike of re-creating anything twice, 
thrice, or ten times over — unnatural task ! — 
are responsible for much of that artifice. We 
can all point in excuse to Shakespeare, who 
was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose 
methods would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the 
amateurishness of Shakespeare has been 
mightily exposed of late years. But nobody 
seems to care. If Flaubert had been a greater 
artist he might have been more of an ama- 
teur. 

IV 

Of this poor neglected matter of technique 
the more important branch is design ■ — or con- 
struction. It is the branch of the art — of all 



52 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

arts — which comes next after " inspiration " — 
a capacious word meant to include everything 
that the artist must be born with and cannot 
acquire. The less important branch of tech- 
nique — far less important — may be described 
as an ornamentation. 

There are very few rules of design in the 
novel; but the few are capital. Nevertheless, 
great novelists have often flouted or ignored 
them — to the detriment of their work. In 
my opinion the first rule is that the interest 
must be centralised; it must not be diffused 
equally over various parts of the canvas. To 
compare one art with another may be perilous, 
but really the convenience of describing a 
novel as a canvas is extreme. In a well-de- 
signed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one 
particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal 
force to several different spots, then we re- 
proach the painter for having " scattered " the 
interest of the picture. Similarly with the 
novel. A novel must have one, two, or three 
figures that easily overtop the rest. These fig- 



WRITING NOVELS 53 

ures must be in the foreground, and the rest in 
the middle-distance or in the back-ground. 

Moreover, these figures — whether they are 
saints or sinners — must somehow be pre- 
sented more sympathetically than the others. 
If this cannot be done, then the inspiration is at 
fault. The single motive that should govern 
the choice of a principal figure is the motive of 
love for that figure. What else could the mo- 
tive be? The race of heroes is essential to art. 
But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the 
figure chosen than the understanding sympathy 
of the artist with the figure. To say that the 
hero has disappeared from modern fiction is 
absurd. All that has happened is that the 
characteristics of the hero have changed, natu- 
rally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote 
" a novel without a hero," he wrote a novel 
with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this 
better than Thackeray. What he meant was 
that he was sick of the conventional bundle of 
characteristics styled a hero in his day, and 
that he had changed the type. Since then we 



54 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

* / 

have grown sick of Dobbins, and 'the type has 

been changed again more than once. The 
fateful hour will arrive when we shall be sick 
of Ponderevos. 

The temptation of the great novelist, over- 
flowing with creative force, is to scatter the in- 
terest. In both his major works Tolstoi found 
the temptation too strong for him. Anna 
Karenina is not one novel, but two, and suf- 
fers accordingly. As for War and Peace, the 
reader wanders about in it as in a forest, for 
days, lost, deprived of a sense of direction, 
and with no vestige of a sign-post ; at intervals 
encountering mysterious faces whose identity 
he in vain tries to recall. On a much smaller 
scale Meredith committed the same error. 
Who could assert positively which of the sis- 
ters Fleming is the heroine of Rhoda Fleming? 
For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch 
Rhoda scarcely appears. And more than once 
the author seems quite to forget that the little 
knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of the 
story. 

The second rule of design — perhaps in the 



WRITING NOVELS 55 

main merely a different view of the first — is 
that the interest must be maintained. It may 
increase, but it must never diminish. Here is 
that special aspect of design which we call con- 
struction, or plot. By interest I mean the in- 
terest of the story itself, and not the interest of 
the continual play of the author's mind on his 
material. In proportion as the interest of the 
story is maintained, the plot is a good one. In 
so far as it lapses, the plot is a bad one. There 
is no other criterion of good construction. 
Readers of a certain class are apt to call good 
the plot of that story in which " you can't tell 
what is going to happen next." But in some of 
the most tedious novels ever written you can't 
tell what is going to happen next — and you 
don't care a fig what is going to happen next. 
It would be nearer the mark to say that the plot 
is good when "you want to make sure what 
will happen next " ! Good plots set you anx- 
iously guessing what will happen next. 

When the reader is misled — not intention- 
ally in order to get an effect, but clumsily 
through amateurishness — then the construe- 



56 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

tion is bad. This calamity does not often occur 
in fine novels, but in really good work 
another calamity does occur with far too much 
frequency — namely, the tantalising of the 
reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wan- 
ton, or negligent shifting of the interest from 
the major to the minor theme. A sad example 
of this infantile trick is to be found in the 
thirty-first chapter of Rhoda Fleming, wherein, 
well knowing that the reader is tingling for 
the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, 
the author, unable to control his own capri- 
cious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, de- 
votes some sixteen pages to the young knave's 
vagaries with an illicit thousand pounds. 
That the sixteen pages are excessively bril- 
liant does not a bit excuse the wilful unshape- 
liness of the book's design. 

The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out 
defenders of Victorian fiction are wont to argue 
that though the event-plot in sundry great 
novels may be loose and casual (that is to say, 
simply careless), the "idea-plot" is usually 
close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never 



WRITING NOVELS 57 

yet been able to comprehend how an idea-plot 
can exist independently of an event-plot (any 
more than how spirit can be conceived apart 
from matter) ; but assuming that an idea-plot 
can exist independently, and that the mysteri- 
ous thing is superior in form to its coarse 
fellow, the event-plot (which I positively do 
not believe), — even then I still hold that slop- 
piness in the fabrication of the event-plot 
amounts to a grave iniquity. In this connec- 
tion I have in mind, among English novels, 
chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," 
George Eliot, the Brontes, and Anthony Trol- 
lope. 

The one other important rule in construc- 
tion is that the plot should be kept throughout 
within the same convention. All plots — even 
those of our most sacred naturalistic contem- 
poraries — are and must be a conventionalisa- 
tion of life. We imagine we have arrived at a 
convention which is nearer to the truth of life 
than that of our forerunners. Perhaps we 
have — but so little nearer that the difference 
is scarcely appreciable! An aviator at mid- 



58 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

day may be nearer the sun than the motorist, 
but regarded as a portion of the entire jour- 
ney to the sun, the aviator's progress upward 
can safely be ignored. No novelist has yet, or 
ever will, come within a hundred million miles 
of life itself. It is impossible for us to see 
how far we still are from life. The defects 
of a new convention disclose themselves late 
in its career. The notion that " naturalists " 
have at last lighted on a final formula which 
ensures truth to life is ridiculous. " Natural- 
ist " is merely an epithet expressing self-satis- 
faction. 

Similarly, the habit of deriding as " conven- 
tional " plots constructed in an earlier conven- 
tion, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens 
in particular has been assaulted; I have as- 
saulted him myself. But within their con- 
vention, the plots of Dickens are excellent, 
and show little trace of amateurishness, and 
every sign of skilled accomplishment. And 
Dickens did not blunder out of one convention 
into another, as certain of ourselves undenia- 
bly do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been ar- 



WRITING NOVELS 59 

raigned for the conventionalism of his plots. 
And yet Hardy happens to be one of the rare 
novelists who have evolved a new convention 
to suit their idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idosyn- 
crasy is a deep conviction of the whimsicality 
of the divine power, and again and again he 
has expressed this with a virtuosity of skill 
which ought to have put humility into the 
hearts of naturalists, but which has not done 
so. The plot of The Woodlanders is one of 
the most exquisite examples of subtle sym- 
bolic illustration of an idea that a writer of fic- 
tion ever achieved ; it makes the symbolism of 
Ibsen seem crude. You may say that The 
Woodlanders could not have occurred in real 
life. No novel could have occurred in real life. 
The balance of probabilities is incalculably 
against any novel whatsoever; and rightly so. 
A convention is essential, and the duty of a 
novelist is to be true within his chosen con- 
vention, and not further. Most novelists still 
fail in this duty. Is there any reason, indeed, 
why we should be so vastly cleverer than our 
fathers ? I do not think we are. 



60 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

V 

Leaving the seductive minor question of 
ornamentation, I come lastly to the question of 
getting the semblance of life on to the page be- 
fore the eyes of the reader — the daily and 
hourly texture of existence. The novelist has 
selected his subject ; he has drenched himself in 
his subject. He has laid down the main feat- 
ures of the design. The living embryo is there, 
and waits to be developed into full organic 
structure. Whence and how does the novelist 
obtain the vital tissue which must be his ma- 
terial? The answer is that he digs it out of 
himself. First-class fiction is, and must be, 
in the final resort autobiographical. What 
else should it be? The novelist may take 
notes of phenomena likely to be of use to him. 
And he may acquire the skill to invent very 
apposite illustrative incident. But he cannot 
invent psychology. Upon occasion some hu- 
man being may entrust him with confidences 
extremely precious for his craft. But such 
windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. 



WRITING NOVELS 61 

From outward symptoms he can guess some- 
thing of the psychology of others. He can use 
a real person as the unrecognisable but help- 
ful basis for each of his characters. . . . And 
all that is nothing. And all special research is 
nothing. When the real intimate work of 
creation has to be done — and it has to be done 
on every page — the novelist can only look 
within for effective aid. Almost solely by ar- 
ranging and modifying what he has felt and 
seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he 
accomplish his end. 

An inquiry into the career of any first-class 
novelist invariably reveals that his novels are 
full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every 
good novel contains far more autobiography 
than any inquiry could reveal. Episodes, 
moods, characters of autobiography can be de- 
tected and traced to their origin by critical 
acumen, but the intimate autobiography that 
runs through each page, vitalising it, may not 
be detected. In dealing with each character 
in each episode the novelist must for a thou- 
sand convincing details interrogate that part of 



62 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

his own individuality which corresponds to the 
particular character. The foundation of his 
equipment is universal sympathy. And the re- 
sult of this (or the cause — I don't know 
which) is that in his own individuality there is 
something of everybody. If he is a born novel- 
ist he is safe in asking himself, when in doubt 
as to the behaviour of a given personage at a 
given point : " Now, what should I have 
done?" And incorporating the answer! 
And this in practice is what he does. Good 
fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours 
of all mankind. 

The necessarily autobiographical nature of 
fiction accounts for the creative repetition to 
which all novelists — including the most 
powerful — are reduced. They monotonously 
yield again and again to the strongest predilec- 
tions of their own individuality. Again and 
again they think they are creating, by observa- 
tion, a quite new character — - and lo! when 
finished it is an old one — autobiographical 
psychology has triumphed! A novelist may 
achieve a reputation with only a single type, 



WRITING NOVELS 63 

created and re-created in varying forms. And 
the very greatest do not contrive to create 
more than half a score genuine separate types. 
In Cerfberr and Christopher biographical dic- 
tionary of the characters of Balzac, a tall vol- 
ume of six hundred pages, there are some two 
thousand entries of different individuals, but 
probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinc- 
tive types. No creative artist ever repeated 
himself more brazenly or more successfully 
than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delight- 
ful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his 
young man-about-town, his virtuous young 
man, his heroic weeping virgin, his angelic 
wife and mother, his poor relation, and his 
faithful stupid servant — each is continually 
popping up with a new name in the Human 
Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as Frank 
Harris has proved, is to be observed in Shake- 
speare. Hamlet of Denmark was only the last 
and greatest of a series of Shakespearean 
Hamlets. 

It may be asked, finally : What of the actual 
process of handling the raw material dug out 



64 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

of existence and of the artist's self — the proc- 
ess of transmuting life into art? There is no 
process. That is to say, there is no conscious 
process. The convention chosen by an artist 
is his illusion of the truth. Consciously the 
artist only omits, selects, arranges. But let 
him beware of being false to his illusion, for 
then the process becomes conscious, and bad. 
This is sentimentality, which is the seed of 
death in his work. Every artist is tempted to 
sentimentalise, or to be cynical — practically 
the same thing. And when he falls to the 
temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, 
be it only for one instant: " That is not true 
to life." And in turn the reader's illusion of 
reality is impaired. Readers are divided into 
two classes — the enemies and the friends of 
the artist. The former, a legion, admire for a 
fortnight or a year. They hate an uncompro- 
mising struggle for the truth. They positively 
like the artist to fall to temptation. If he 
falls, they exclaim, "How sweet!" The lat- 
ter are capable of savouring the fine unpleas- 
antness of the struggle for truth. And when 



WRITING NOVELS 65 

they whisper in their hearts : " That is not 
true to life," they are ashamed for the artist. 
They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. 
It is they who confer immortality. 



PART III 
WRITING PLAYS 



PART III 

WRITING PLAYS 

I 

THERE is an idea abroad, assiduously 
fostered as a rule by critics who hap- 
pen to have written neither novels 
nor plays, that it is more difficult to write a 
play than a novel. I do not think so. I have 
written or collaborated in about twenty novels 
and about twenty plays, and I am convinced 
that it is easier to write a play than a novel. 
Personally, I would sooner write two plays 
than one novel; less expenditure of nervous 
force and mere brains would be required for 
two plays than for one novel. (I emphasise 
the word " write," because if the whole weari- 
ness between the first conception and the first 
performance of a play is compared with the 
whole weariness between the first conception 
69 



70 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

and the first publication of a novel, then the 
play has it. I would sooner get seventy-and- 
seven novels produced than one play. But my 
immediate object is to compare only writ- 
ting with writing.) It seems to me that the 
sole persons entitled to judge of the compara- 
tive difficulty of writing plays and writing 
novels are those authors who have succeeded 
or failed equally well in both departments. 
And in this limited band I imagine that the dif- 
ferences of opinion on the point could not be 
marked. I would like to note in passing, for 
the support of my proposition, that whereas 
established novelists not infrequently venture 
into the theatre with audacity, established 
dramatists are very cautious indeed about 
quitting the theatre. An established dram- 
atist usually takes good care to write plays 
and naught else; he will not affront the risks 
of coming out into the open; and therein his 
instinct is quite properly that of self-preserva- 
tion. Of many established dramatists all over 
the world it may be affirmed that if they were 
so indiscreet as to publish a novel, the result 



WRITING PLAYS 71 

would be a great shattering and a great 
awakening. 



II 

An enormous amount of vague reverential 
nonsense is talked about the technique 
of the stage, the assumption being that in 
difficulty it far surpasses any other literary 
technique, and that until it is acquired 
a respectable play cannot be written. One 
hears also that it can only be acquired be- 
hind the scenes. A famous actor-manager 
once kindly gave me the benefit of his experi- 
ence, and what he said was that a dramatist 
who wished to learn his business must live be- 
hind the scenes — and study the works of 
Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no tech- 
nique is so crude and so simple as the tech- 
nique of the stage, and that the proper place 
to learn it is not behind the scenes but in the 
pit. Managers, being the most conservative 
people on earth, except compositors, will hon- 
estly try to convince the naive dramatist that 
effects can only be obtained in the precise way 



72 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

in which effects have always been obtained, 
and that this and that rule must not be broken 
on pain of outraging the public. And indeed 
it is natural that managers should talk thus, 
seeing the low state of the drama, because in 
any art rules and reaction always flourish 
when creative energy is sick. The man- 
darins have ever said and will ever say that a 
technique which does not correspond with 
their own is no technique, but simple clumsi- 
ness. There are some seven situations in the 
customary drama, and a play which does not 
contain at least one of those situations in each 
act will be condemned as " undramatic," or 
" thin," or as being " all talk." It may contain 
half a hundred other situations, but for the 
mandarin a situation which is not one of the 
seven is not a situation. Similarly there are 
some dozen character types in the customary 
drama, and all original — that is, truthful — 
characterisation will be dismissed as a total 
absence of characterisation because it does not 
reproduce any of these dozen types. Thus 
every truly original play is bound to be in- 



WRITING PLAYS 73 

dieted for bad technique. The author is 
bound to be told that what he has written may 
be marvellously clever, but that it is not a 
play. I remember the day — and it is not long 
ago — when even so experienced and sincere a 
critic as William Archer used to argue that if 
the " intellectual " drama did not succeed with 
the general public, it was because its technique 
was not up to the level of the technique of the 
commercial drama! Perhaps he has changed 
his opinion since then. Heaven knows that 
the so-called " intellectual " drama is amateur- 
ish enough, but nearly all literary art 
is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual 
drama could hope to compete in clumsiness 
with some of the most successful commercial 
plays of modern times. I tremble to think 
what the mandarins and William Archer 
would say to the technique of Hamlet, could it 
by some miracle be brought forward as a new 
piece by a Mr. Shakspere. They would 
probably recommend Mr. Shakspere to con- 
sider the ways of Sardou, Henri Bernstein, and 
Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most posi- 



74 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

tively they would assert that Hamlet was not 
a play. And their pupils of the daily press 
would point out — what surely Mr. Shaks- 
pere ought to have perceived for himself — 
that the second, third, or fourth act might be 
cut wholesale without the slightest loss to the 
piece. 

In the sense in which mandarins understand 
the word technique, there is no technique 
special to the stage except that which concerns 
the moving of solid human bodies to and fro, 
and the limitations of the human senses. The 
dramatist must not expect his audience to be 
able to see or hear two things at once, nor to 
be incapable of fatigue. And he must not ex- 
pect his interpreters to stroll round or come 
on or go off in a satisfactory manner unless he 
provides them with satisfactory reasons for 
strolling round, coming on, or going off. 
Lastly, he must not expect his interpreters to 
achieve physical impossibilities. The drama- 
tist who sends a pretty woman off in street at- 
tire and seeks to bring her on again in thirty 
seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail 



WRITING PLAYS 75, 

in stage technique, but he has not proved that 
stage technique is tremendously difficult; he 
has proved something quite else. 

Ill 
One reason why a play is easier to write 
than a novel is that a play is shorter than 
a novel. On the average, one may say that 
it takes six plays to make the matter of a 
novel. Other things being equal, a short 
work of art presents fewer difficulties than 
a longer one. The contrary is held true by 
the majority, but then the majority, having 
never attempted to produce a long work of 
art, are unqualified to offer an opinion. It 
is said that the most difficult form of poetry 
is the sonnet. But the most difficult form 
of poetry is the epic. The proof that the 
sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to 
be in the fewness of perfect sonnets. There 
are, however, far more perfect sonnets than 
perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a 
heavenly accident. But such accidents can 
never happen to writers of epics. Some years 



76 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

ago we had an enormous palaver about the 
" art of the short story," which numerous per- 
sons who had omitted to write novels pro- 
nounced to be more difficult than the novel. 
But the fact remains that there are scores of 
perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful 
whether anybody but Turgenev ever did write 
a perfect novel. A short form is easier to 
manipulate than a long form, because its con- 
struction is less complicated, because the bal- 
ance of its proportions can be more easily cor- 
rected by means of a rapid survey, because it 
is lawful and even necessary in it to leave un- 
done many things which are very hard to do, 
and because the emotional strain is less pro- 
longed. The most difficult thing in all art is 
to maintain the imaginative tension unslack- 
ened throughout a considerable period. 

Then, not only does a play contain less mat- 
ter than a novel — it is further simplified by 
the fact that it contains fewer kinds of mat- 
ter, and less subtle kinds of matter. There are 
numerous delicate and difficult affairs of craft 
that the dramatist need not think about at 



WRITING PLAYS 77 

all. If he attempts to go beyond a certain 
very mild degree of subtlety, he is merely 
wasting his time. What passes for subtle on 
the stage would have a very obvious air in a 
novel, as some dramatists have unhappily dis- 
covered. Thus whole continents of danger 
may be shunned by the dramatist, and instead 
of being scorned for his cowardice he will be 
very rightly applauded for his artistic dis- 
cretion. Fortunate predicament! Again, he 
need not — indeed, he must not — save in a 
primitive and hinting manner, concern himself 
with " atmosphere." He may roughly suggest 
one, but if he begins on the feat of " creating " 
an atmosphere (as it is called), the last sub- 
urban train will have departed before he has 
reached the crisis of the play. The last sub- 
urban train is the best friend of the dramatist, 
though the fellow seldom has the sense to see 
it. Further, he is saved all descriptive work. 
See a novelist harassing himself into his grave 
over the description of a landscape, a room, a 
gesture — while the dramatist grins. The 
dramatist may have to imagine a landscape, a 



78 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

room, or a gesture ; but he has not got to write 
it — and it is the writing which hastens death. 
If a dramatist and a novelist set out to portray 
a clever woman, they are almost equally 
matched, because each has to make the crea- 
ture say things and do things. But if they set 
out to portray a charming woman, the drama- 
tist can recline in an easy chair and smoke 
while the novelist is ruining temper, digestion 
and eyesight, and spreading terror in his 
household by his moodiness and unapproacha- 
bility. The electric light burns in the novel- 
ist's study at three a. m., — the novelist is still 
endeavouring to convey by means of words the 
extraordinary fascination that his heroine 
could exercise over mankind by the mere act 
of walking into a room; and he never has 
really succeeded and never will. The drama- 
tist writes curtly, " Enter Millicent." All are 
anxious to do the dramatist's job for him. Is 
the play being read at home — the reader ea- 
gerly and with brilliant success puts his ima- 
gination to work and completes a charming 
Millicent after his own secret desires. 



WRITING PLAYS 79 

(Whereas he would coldly decline to add one 
touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a 
novel.) Is the play being performed on the 
stage — an experienced, conscientious, and 
perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest 
to prove that the dramatist was right about 
Millicent's astounding fascination. And if 
she fails, nobody will blame the dramatist ; the 
dramatist will receive naught but sympathy. 

And there is still another region of super- 
lative difficulty which is narrowly circum- 
scribed for the spoilt dramatist: I mean the 
whole business of persuading the public that 
the improbable is probable. Every work of 
art is and must be crammed with improbabili- 
ties and artifice ; and the greater portion of the 
artifice is employed in just this trickery of per- 
suasion. Only, the public of the dramatist 
needs far less persuading than the public of 
the novelist. The novelist announces that 
Millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, 
and in spite of all the novelist's corroborative 
and exegetical detail the insulted reader de- 
clines to credit the statement and condemns 



80 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

the incident as unconvincing. The dramatist 
decides that Millicent must accept the hand 
of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage 
in flesh and blood, veritably doing it! Not 
easy for even the critical beholder to maintain 
that Millicent could not and did not do such a 
silly thing when he has actually with his eyes 
seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as 
usual, having done less, is more richly re- 
warded by results. 

Of course it will be argued, as it has always 
been argued, by those who have not written 
novels, that it is precisely the " doing less " — 
the leaving out — that constitutes the unique 
and fearful difficulty of dramatic art. " The 
skill to leave out " — lo ! the master faculty of 
the dramatist! But, in the first place, I do 
not believe that, having regard to the relative 
scope of the play and of the novel, the neces- 
sity for leaving out is more acute in the one 
than in the other. The adjective "photo- 
graphic" is as absurd applied to the novel as 
to the play. And, in the second place, other 
factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and 



WRITING PLAYS 81 

it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than 
to do. To know when to refrain from doing 
may be hard, but positively to do is even 
harder. Sometimes, listening to partisans of 
the drama, I have been moved to suggest that, 
if the art of omission is so wondrously diffi- 
cult, a dramatist who practised the habit of 
omitting to write anything whatever ought to 
be hailed as the supreme craftsman. 

IV 

The more closely one examines the sub- 
ject, the more clear and certain becomes 
the fact that there is only one fundamental 
artistic difference between the novel and the 
play, and that difference (to which I shall 
come later) is not the difference which would 
be generally named as distinguishing the play 
from the novel. The apparent differences are 
superficial, and are due chiefly to considera- 
tions of convenience. 

Whether in a play or in a novel the creative 
artist has to tell a story — using the word 
story in a very wide sense. Just as a novel 



82 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

is divided into chapters, and for a similar 
reason, a play is divided into acts. But 
neither chapters nor acts are necessary. 
Some of Balzac's chief novels have no chapter- 
divisions, and it has been proved that a theatre 
audience can and will listen for two hours to 
" talk," and even recitative singing, on the 
stage, without a pause. Indeed, audiences, 
under the compulsion of an artist strong and 
imperious enough, could, I am sure, be trained 
to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity. 
However, chapters and acts are usual, and they 
involve the same constructional processes on 
the part of the artist. The entire play or novel 
must tell a complete story — that is, arouse a 
curiosity and reasonably satisfy it, raise a main 
question and then settle it. And each 
act or other chief division must tell a definite 
portion of the story, satisfy part of the curi- 
osity, settle part of the question. And each 
scene or other minor division must do the same 
according to its scale. Everything basic that 
applies to the technique of the novel applies 
equally to the technique of the play. 



WRITING PLAYS 83 

In particular, I would urge that a play, any 
more than a novel, need not be dramatic, em- 
ploying the term as it is usually employed. 
In so far as it suspends the listener's interest, 
every tale, however told, may be said to be 
dramatic. In this sense The Golden Bowl 
is dramatic ; so are Dominique and Persuasion. 
A play need not be more dramatic than that. 
Very emphatically a play need not be dramatic 
in the stage sense. It need never induce in- 
terest to the degree of excitement. It need 
have nothing that resembles what would be 
recognisable in the theatre as a situation. It 
may amble on — and it will still be a play, and 
it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious 
hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of 
thousands, according to the talent of the 
author. Without doubt mandarins will con- 
tinue for about a century yet to excommuni- 
cate certain plays from the category of plays. 
But nobody will be any the worse. And 
dramatists will go on proving that whatever 
else divides a play from a book, " dramatic 
quality " does not. Some arch-Mandarin may 



84 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

launch at me one of those mandarinic epigram- 
matic questions which are supposed to over- 
throw the adversary at one dart. " Do you 
seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama need 
not be dramatic? " I do, if the word dramatic 
is to be used in the mandarinic signification. 
I mean to state that some of the finest plays 
of the modern age differ from a psychologi- 
cal novel in nothing but the superficial form 
of telling. Example, Henri Becque's La 
Parisienne, than which there is no better. If 
I am asked to give my own definition of the ad- 
jective " dramatic," I would say that that story 
is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined 
to be spoken by actors and actresses on the 
stage, and that any narrower definition is 
bound to exclude some genuine plays uni- 
versally accepted as such — even by man- 
darins. For be it noted that the mandarin is 
never consistent. 

My definition brings me to the sole tech- 
nical difference between a play and a novel — 
in the play the story is told by means of a 
dialogue. It is a difference less important 



WRITING PLAYS 85 

than it seems, and not invariably even a sure 
point of distinction between the two kinds of 
narrative. For a novel may consist exclu- 
sively of dialogue. And plays may contain 
other matter than dialogue. The classic 
chorus is not dialogue. But nowadays we 
should consider the device of the chorus to be 
clumsy, as, nowadays, it indeed would be. 
We have grown very ingenious and clever at 
the trickery of making characters talk to the 
audience and explain themselves and their past 
history while seemingly innocent of any such 
intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist 
has to face a difficulty special to himself, which 
the novelist can avoid. I believe it to be the 
sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, 
and that it is not acute is proved by the ease 
with which third-rate dramatists have gener- 
ally vanquished it. Mandarins are wont to 
assert that the dramatist is also handicapped 
by the necessity for rigid economy in the use 
of material. This is not so. Rigid economy 
in the use of material is equally advisable in 
every form of art. If it is a necessity, it is a 



86 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

necessity which all artists flout from time to 
time, and occasionally with gorgeous results, 
and the successful dramatist has hitherto not 
been less guilty of flouting it than the novelist 
or any other artist. 

V 

And now, having shown that some al- 
leged differences between the play and 
the novel are illusory, and that a certain 
technical difference, though possibly real, is 
superficial and slight, I come to the funda- 
mental difference between them — a difference 
which the laity does not suspect, which is 
seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, 
but which nobody who is well versed in the 
making of both plays and novels can fail to 
feel profoundly. The emotional strain of 
writing a play is not merely less prolonged 
than that of writing a novel, it is less severe 
even while it lasts, lower in degree and of a 
less purely creative character. And herein is 
the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier 
to write than a novel. The drama does not 



WRITING PLAYS 87 

belong exclusively to literature, because its ef- 
fect depends on something more than the com- 
position of words. The dramatist is the sole 
author of a play, but he is not the sole creator 
of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, 
on the other hand, he cannot do everything 
himself. He begins the work of creation, 
which is finished either by creative interpreters 
on the stage, or by the creative imagination of 
the reader in the study. It is as if he carried 
an immense weight to the landing at the turn 
of a flight of stairs, and that thence upward 
the lifting had to be done by other people. 
Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, 
and the dramatist is the base — but he is not 
the apex. A play is a collaboration of creative 
faculties. The egotism of the dramatist re- 
sents this uncomfortable fact, but the fact ex- 
ists. And further, the creative faculties are 
not only those of the author, the stage-director 
(" producer ") and the actors — the audience 
itself is unconsciously part of the collabora- 
tion. 

Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the 



88 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

whole work of creation before the acting be- 
gins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of 
others, and will fail of proper accomplishment 
at the end. The dramatist must deliberately, 
in performing his share of the work, leave 
scope for a multitude of alien faculties whose 
operations he can neither precisely foresee nor 
completely control. The point is not that in 
the writing of a play there are various sorts of 
matters — as we have already seen — which 
the dramatist must ignore; the point is that 
even in the region proper to him he must not 
push the creative act to its final limit. He 
must ever remember those who are to come 
after him. For instance, though he must visu- 
alise a scene as he writes it, he should not 
visualise it completely, as a novelist should. 
The novelist may perceive vividly the faces 
of his personages, but if the playwright 
insists on seeing faces, either he will see the 
faces of real actors and hamper himself by 
moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or 
he will perceive imaginary faces, and the ulti- 
mate interpretation will perforce falsify his 



WRITING PLAYS 89 

work and nullify his intentions. This aspect 
of the subject might well be much amplified, 
but only for a public of practising dramatists. 

VI 

When the play is "finished," the processes 
of collaboration have yet to begin. The seri- 
ous work of the dramatist is over, but the most 
desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do 
not refer to the business of arranging with a 
theatrical manager for the production of the 
play. For, though that generally partakes of 
the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the 
nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact 
that theatrical managers are — no doubt inevi- 
tably — theatrical. Nevertheless, even the 
theatrical manager, while disclaiming the 
slightest interest in anything more vital to the 
stage than the box-office, is himself in some 
degree a collaborator, and is the first to show 
to the dramatist that a play is not a play till 
it is performed. The manager reads the play, 
and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads 
quite a different play from that which the 



go THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular 
the manager reads a play which can scarcely 
hope to succeed — indeed, a play against 
whose chances of success ten thousand power- 
ful reasons can be adduced. It is remarkable 
that a manager nearly always foresees failure 
in a manuscript, and very seldom success. 
The manager's profoundest instinct — self- 
preservation again ! — is to refuse a play ; if he 
accepts, it is against the grain, against his 
judgment — and out of a mad spirit of adven- 
ture. Some of the most glittering successes 
have been rehearsed in an atmosphere of set- 
tled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an 
immense contempt for the opinions artistic and 
otherwise of the manager, and he is therein 
justified. The manager's vocation is not to 
write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, 
nor to direct the rehearsals of them, and even 
his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box- 
office has often proved to be pitiably delusive. 
The manager's true and only vocation is to 
refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, 
however, the manager has already collaborated 



WRITING PLAYS 91 

in the play. The dramatist sees it differently 
now. All sorts of new considerations have 
been presented to him. Not a word has been 
altered; but it is noticeably another play. 
Which is merely to say that the creative work 
on it which still remains to be done has been 
more accurately envisaged. This strange ex- 
perience could not happen to a novel, because 
when a novel is written it is finished. 

And when the director of rehearsals, or pro- 
ducer, has been chosen, and this priceless and 
mysterious person has his first serious con- 
fabulation with the author, then at once the 
play begins to assume new shapes — contours 
undreamt of by the author till that startling 
moment. And even if the author has the te- 
merity to conduct his own rehearsals, similar 
disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the 
author as a producer is a different fellow from 
the author as author. The producer is up 
against realities. He, first, renders the play 
concrete, gradually condenses its filmy vapours 
into a solid element. . . . He suggests the cast- 
ing. " What do you think of X. for the old 



92 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

man? " asks the producer. The author is stag- 
gered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a 
producer can have so misread and misunder- 
stood the play? X. would be preposterous as 
the old man. But the producer goes on talk- 
ing. And suddenly the author sees possibili- 
ties in X. But at the same time he sees a dif- 
ferent play from what he wrote. And quite 
probably he sees a more glorious play. Quite 
probably he had not suspected how great a 
dramatist he is. . . . Before the first rehearsal 
is called, the play, still without a word altered, 
has gone through astounding creative trans- 
mutations; the author recognises in it some 
likeness to his beloved child, but it is the like- 
ness of a first cousin. 

At the first rehearsal, and for many rehears- 
als, to an extent perhaps increasing, perhaps 
decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an 
apologetic and self-conscious mood; and his 
mien is something between that of a criminal 
who has committed a horrid offence and that 
of a father over the crude body of a new-born 
child. Now in truth he deeply realises that 



WRITING PLAYS 93 

the play is a collaboration. In extreme cases 
he may be brought to see that he himself is 
one of the less important factors in the col- 
laboration. The first preoccupation of the in- 
terpreters is not with his play at all, but — 
quite rightly — with their own careers ; if they 
were not honestly convinced that their own 
careers were the chief genuine excuse for the 
existence of the theatre and the play they 
would not act very well. But, more than that, 
they do not regard his play as a sufficient ve- 
hicle for the furtherance of their careers. At 
the most favourable, what they secretly think 
is that if they are permitted to exercise their 
talents on his play there is a chance that they 
may be able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle 
for the furtherance of their careers. The atti- 
tude of every actor towards his part is : " My 
part is not much of a part as it stands, but if 
my individuality is allowed to get into free 
contact with it, I may make something bril- 
liant out of it." Which attitude is a proper 
attitude, and an attitude in my opinion 
justified by the facts of the case. The actor's 



94 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

phrase is that he creates a part, and he 
is right. He completes the labour of creation 
begun by the author and continued by the pro- 
ducer, and if reasonable liberty is not accorded 
to him — if either the author or the producer 
attempts to do too much of the creative work 

— the result cannot be satisfactory. 

As the rehearsals proceed the play changes 
from day to day. However autocratic the pro- 
ducer, however obstinate the dramatist, 
the play will vary at each rehearsal like a large 
cloud in a gentle wind. It is never the same 
play for two days together. Nor is this sur- 
prising, seeing that every day and night a 
dozen, or it may be two dozen, human beings 
endowed with the creative gift are creatively 
working on it. Every dramatist who is candid 
with himself — I do not suggest that he should 
be candid to the theatrical world — well knows 
that though his play is often worsened by 
his collaborators it is also often improved, 

— and improved in the most mysterious 
and dazzling manner — without a word being 
altered. Producer and actors do not merely 



WRITING PLAYS 95 

suggest possibilities, they execute them. And 
the author is confronted by artistic phenom- 
ena for which lawfully he may not claim 
credit. On the other hand, he may be con- 
fronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to 
which lawfully he is blameless, but which he 
cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a battle, — 
certain persons are theoretically in control, but 
in fact the thing principally fights itself. And 
thus the creation goes on until the dress-re- 
hearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. 
And the dramatist lying awake in the night re- 
flects, stoically, fatalistically : " Well, that is 
the play that they have made of my play ! " 
And he may be pleased or he may be disgusted. 
But if he attends the first performance he can- 
not fail to notice, after the first few minutes 
of it, that he was quite mistaken, and that what 
the actors are performing is still another play. 
The audience is collaborating. 



PART IV 
THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC 



PART IV 

THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC 

I 

I CAN divide all the imaginative writers 
I have ever met into two classes — those 
who admitted and sometimes proclaimed 
loudly that they desired popularity; and those 
who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle con- 
tempt for popularity. The latter, however, al- 
ways failed to conceal their envy of popu- 
lar authors, and this envy was a phenom- 
enon whose truculent bitterness could not be 
surpassed even in political or religious life. 
And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous 
chapter) the object of the artist is to share 
his emotions with others, it would be strange 
if the normal artist spurned popularity in or- 
der to keep his emotions as much as possible 
to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest 
nonsense has been and will be written by un- 
99 



ioo THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

creative critics, of course in the higher inter- 
ests of creative authors, about popularity and 
the proper attitude of the artist thereto. But 
possibly the attitude of a first-class artist him- 
self may prove a more valuable guide. 

The Letters of George Meredith (of which 
the first volume is a magnificent unfolding of 
the character of a great man) are full of refer- 
ences to popularity, references overt and 
covert. Meredith could never — and quite 
naturally — get away from the idea of popu- 
larity. He was a student of the English pub- 
lic, and could occasionally be unjust to it. 
Writing to M. Andre Raffalovich (who had 
sent him a letter of appreciation) in Novem- 
ber, 1881, he said: "I venture to judge by 
your name that you are at most but half Eng- 
lish. I can consequently believe in the feel- 
ing you express for the work of an unpopular 
writer. Otherwise one would incline to be 
sceptical, for the English are given to prac- 
tical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors 
who are supposed to languish in the shade 
amuses them." A remark curiously unfair to 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 101 

the small, faithful band of admirers which 
Meredith then had. The whole letter, while 
warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy. 
Further on in it he says : " Good work has a 
fair chance to be recognised in the end, and if 
not, what does it matter? " But there is con- 
stant proof that it did matter very much. In 
a letter to William Hardman, written when he 
was well and hopeful, he says : " Never mind : 
if we do but get the public ear, oh, my dear 
old boy ! " To Captain Maxse, in reference to 
a vast sum of £8,000 paid by the Cornhill peo- 
ple to George Eliot (for an unreadable novel), 
he exclaims : " Bon Dieu ! Will aught like 
this ever happen to me? " 

And to his son he was very explicit about 
the extent to which unpopularity " mattered " : 
" As I am unpopular I am ill-paid, and there- 
fore bound to work double ties, hardly ever 
able to lay down the pen. This affects my 
weakened stomach, and so the round of the 
vicious circle is looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) 
And in another letter to Arthur Mere- 
dith about the same time he sums up his career 



102 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

thus : " As for me, I have failed, and I find 
little to make the end undesirable." (Vol. I., 
p. 318.) This letter is dated June 23rd, 1881. 
Meredith was then fifty-three years of age. 
He had written Modern Love, The Shaving of 
Shagpat, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 
Rhoda Fleming, The Egoist and other master- 
pieces. He knew that he had done his best 
and that his best was very fine. It would be 
difficult to credit that he did not privately 
deem himself one of the masters of English 
literature and destined to what we call immor- 
tality. He had the enthusiastic appreciation 
of some of the finest minds of the epoch. 
And yet, " As for me, I have failed, and I find 
little to make the end undesirable." But he 
had not failed in his industry, nor in the 
quality of his work, nor in achieving self-re- 
spect and the respect of his friends. He had 
failed only in one thing — immediate popu- 
larity. 

II 

Assuming then that an author is justified 
in desiring immediate popularity, instead of be- 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 103 

ing content with poverty and the unheard 
plaudits of posterity, another point presents it- 
self. Ought he to limit himself to a mere de- 
sire for popularity, or ought he actually to do 
something, or to refrain from doing some- 
thing, to the special end of obtaining popular- 
ity? Ought he to say: " I shall write exactly 
what and how I like, without any regard for 
the public; I shall consider nothing but my 
own individuality and powers; I shall be 
guided solely by my own personal conception 
of what the public ought to like "? Or ought 
he to say : " Let me examine this public, and 
let me see whether some compromise between 
us is not possible"? 

Certain authors are never under the neces- 
sity of facing the alternative. Occasionally, 
by chance, a genius may be so fortunately con- 
stituted and so brilliantly endowed that he cap- 
tures the public at once, prestige being estab- 
lished, and the question of compromise never 
arises. But this is exceedingly rare. On the 
other hand, many mediocre authors, exercising 
the most complete sincerity, find ample 



io 4 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the pub- 
lic, and are never troubled by any problem 
worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. 
Such authors enjoy in plenty the gewgaw 
known as happiness. Of nearly all really 
original artists, however, it may be said that 
they are at loggerheads with the public — as 
an almost inevitable consequence of their 
originality; and for them the problem of 
compromise or no-compromise acutely ex- 
ists. 

George Meredith was such an artist. 
George Meredith before anything else was a 
poet. He would have been a better poet than 
a novelist, and I believe that he thought so. 
The public did not care for his poetry. If he 
had belonged to the no-compromise school, 
whose adherents usually have the effrontery 
to claim him, he would have said : " I shall 
keep on writing poetry, even if I have to be- 
come a stockbroker in order to do it." But 
when he was only thirty-three — a boy, as 
authors go — he had already tired of no-com- 
promise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 105 

" It may be that in a year or two I shall find 
time for a full sustained Song. . . . The worst 
is that having taken to prose delineations of 
character and life, one's affections are di- 
vided. . . . And in truth, being a servant of 
the public, / must wait till my master com- 
mands before I take seriously to singing" 
(Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example 
as one is likely to find of a first-class artist 
openly admitting the futility of writing what 
will not be immediately read, when he can 
write something else, less to his taste, that will 
be read. The same sentiment has actuated an 
immense number of first-class creative artists, 
including Shakspere, who would have been a 
rare client for a literary agent. ... So much 
for refraining from doing the precise sort of 
work one would prefer to do because it is not 
appreciated by the public. 

There remains the doing of a sort of work 
against the grain because the public appreci- 
ates it — otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 
Meredith wrote to Mrs. Ross : " I am en- 
gaged in extra potboiling work which enables 



106 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

me to do this," i.e., to write an occasional long 
poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh, base compro- 
mise 1 Seventeen years later he wrote to R. L. 
Stevenson : " Of potboilers let none speak. 
Jove hangs them upon necks that could soar 
above his heights but for the accursed weight." 
(Vol. I., p. 291.) It may be said that Mere- 
dith was forced to write potboilers. He was 
no more forced to write potboilers than any 
other author. Sooner than wallow in that 
shame, he might have earned money in more 
difficult ways. Or he might have indulged in 
that starvation so heartily prescribed for 
authors by a plutocratic noble who occasion- 
ally deigns to employ the English tongue in 
prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and 
Meredith wrote potboilers, because he was a 
first-class artist and a man of profound com- 
mon sense. Being extremely creative, he had 
to arrive somehow, and he remembered that 
the earth is the earth, and the world the world, 
and men men, and he arrived as best he could. 
The great majority of his peers have acted 
similarly. 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 107 

The truth is that an artist who demands ap- 
preciation from the public on his own terms, 
and on none but his own terms, is either a god 
or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is 
somewhat more likely to be the latter than the 
former. He wants too much. There are two 
sides to every bargain, including the artistic. 
The most fertile and the most powerful artists 
are the readiest to recognise this, because their 
sense of proportion, which is the sense of or- 
der, is well developed. The lack of the sense 
of proportion is the mark of the petit maitre. 
The sagacious artist, while respecting himself, 
will respect the idiosyncrasies of his public. 
To do both simultaneously is quite possible. 
In particular, the sagacious artist will respect 
basic national prejudices. For example, no 
first-class English novelist or dramatist would 
dream of allowing to his pen the freedom in 
treating sexual phenomena which Continental 
writers enjoy as a matter of course. The 
British public is admittedly wrong on this im- 
portant point — hypocritical, illogical and ab- 
surd. But what would you? You cannot 



108 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

defy it ; you literally cannot. If you tried, you 
would not even get as far as print, to say noth- 
ing of library counters. You can only get 
round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only 
go a very little further than is quite safe. You 
can only do one man's modest share in the edu- 
cation of the public. 

In Valery Larbaud's latest novel, A. O. 
Barnabooth, occurs a phrase of deep wisdom 
about women: "La femme est une grande 
realite, comme la guerre" It might be ap- 
plied to the public. The public is a great actu- 
ality, like war. If you are a creative and 
creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it 
can ignore you. There it is! You can do 
something with it, but not much. And what 
you do not do with it, it must do with you, if 
there is to be the contact which is essential 
to the artistic function. This contact may be 
closened and completed by the artist's clever- 
ness — the mere cleverness of adaptability 
which most first-class artists have exhibited. 
You can wear the fashions of the day. You 
can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 109 

distract his attention while you stab him in the 
chest. You can cajole money out of him by 
one kind of work in order to gain leisure in 
which to force him to accept later on some- 
thing that he would prefer to refuse. You can 
use a thousand devices on the excellent simple- 
ton. . . . And in the process you may degrade 
yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of 
course you may; as you may become a drunk- 
ard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, 
if you have anything to say worth saying, you 
usually don't succumb to this danger. If you 
have anything to say worth saying, you usu- 
ally manage somehow to get it said, and read. 
The artist of genuine vocation is apt to be a 
wily person. He knows how to sacrifice ines- 
sentials so that he may retain essentials. And 
he can mysteriously put himself even into a 
potboiler. Clarissa Harlowe, which influenced 
fiction throughout Europe, was the direct re- 
sult of potboiling. If the artist has not the 
wit and the strength of mind to keep his own 
soul amid the collisions of life, he is the in- 
ferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, 



no THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

and ought to retire to the upper branches of 
the Civil Service. 

Ill 

When the author has finished the compo- 
sition of a work, when he has put into the 
trappings of the time as much of his eternal 
self as they will safely hold, having regard to 
the best welfare of his creative career as a 
whole, when, in short, he has done all that 
he can to ensure the fullest public apprecia- 
tion of the essential in him — there still re- 
mains to be accomplished something which is 
not unimportant in the entire affair of ob- 
taining contact with the public. He has to 
see that the work is placed before the public 
as advantageously as possible. In other 
words, he has to dispose of the work as ad- 
vantageously as possible. In other words, 
when he lays down the pen he ought to be- 
come a merchant, for the mere reason that he 
has an article to sell, and the more skilfully 
he sells it the better will be the result, not 
only for the public appreciation of his mes- 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC in 

sage, but for himself as a private individual 
and as an artist with further activities in front 
of him. 

Now this absolutely logical attitude of a 
merchant towards one's finished work infuri- 
ates the dilettanti of the literary world, to 
whom the very word " royalties " is anathema. 
They apparently would prefer to treat litera- 
ture as they imagine Byron treated it, although 
as a fact no poet in a short life ever contrived 
to make as many pounds sterling out of verse 
as Byron made. Or perhaps they would like 
to return to the golden days when the author 
had to be " patronised " in order to exist ; or 
even to the mid-nineteenth century, when 
practically all authors save the most success- 
ful — and not a few of the successful also — 
failed to obtain the fair reward of their work. 
The dilettanti's snobbishness and sentimental- 
ity prevent them from admitting that, in a 
democratic age, when an author is genuinely 
appreciated, either he makes money or he is 
the foolish victim of a scoundrel. They are 
fond of saying that agreements and royalties 



ii2 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

have nothing to do with literature. But agree- 
ments and royalties have a very great deal to 
do with literature. Full contact between ar- 
tist and public depends largely upon publisher 
or manager being compelled to be efficient and 
just. And upon the publisher's or manager's 
efficiency and justice depend also the dignity, 
the leisure, the easy flow of coin, the freedom, 
and the pride which are helpful to the full 
fruition of any artist. No artist was ever as- 
sisted in his career by the yoke, by servitude, 
by enforced monotony, by overwork, by eco- 
nomic inferiority. See Meredith's correspond- 
ence everywhere. 

Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing 
badly that which might be done well. If an 
artist writes a fine poem, shows it to his dear- 
est friend, and burns it — I can respect him. 
But if an artist writes a fine poem, and then 
by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to 
be inefficiently published, and fails to secure 
his own interests in the transaction, on the 
plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, 
then I refuse to respect him. A man cannot 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 113 

fulfil, and has no right to fulfil, one function 
only in this complex world. Some, indeed 
many, of the greatest creative artists have 
managed to be very good merchants also, and 
have not been ashamed of the double role. To 
read the correspondence and memoirs of cer- 
tain supreme artists one might be excused for 
thinking, indeed, that they were more inter- 
ested in the role of merchant than in the other 
role; and yet their work in no wise suffered. 
In the distribution of energy between the two 
roles common sense is naturally needed. But 
the artist who has enough common sense — 
or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of re- 
ality — not to disdain the role of merchant 
will probably have enough not to exaggerate 
it. He may be reassured on one point — 
namely, that success in the role of merchant 
will never impair any self-satisfaction he may 
feel in the role of artist. The late discovery 
of a large public in America delighted Mere- 
dith and had a tonic effect on his whole sys- 
tem. It is often hinted, even if it is not often 
said, that great popularity ought to disturb the 



ii 4 TH E AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

conscience of the artist. I do not believe it. 
If the conscience of the artist is not disturbed 
during the actual work itself, no subsequent 
phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once 
the artist is convinced of his artistic honesty, 
no public can be too large for his peace of 
mind. On the other hand, failure in the role 
of merchant will emphatically impair his self- 
satisfaction in the role of artist and his 
courage in the further pursuance of that 
role. 

But many artists have admittedly no apti- 
tude for merchantry. Not only is their sense 
of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but 
they are apt in business to behave in a puerile 
manner, to close an arrangement out of mere 
impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be 
victimised by their vanity, to believe what they 
ought not to believe, to discredit what is pat- 
ently true, to worry over negligible trifles, 
and generally to make a clumsy mess of their 
affairs. An artist may say : " I cannot work 
unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 115 

a free mind if I am to be bothered all the time 
by details of business." 

Apart from the fact that no artist who pre- 
tends also to be a man can in this world hope 
for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neg- 
lecting his debtors he will be deprived of it 
by his creditors — apart from that, the artist's 
demand for a free mind is reasonable. More- 
over, it is always a distressing sight to see a 
man trying to do what nature has not fitted 
him to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, 
however — and they form possibly the major- 
ity — can always employ an expert to do their 
business for them, to cope on their behalf with 
the necessary middleman. Not that I deem 
the publisher or the theatrical manager to be 
by nature less upright than any other class of 
merchant. But the publisher and the theatri- 
cal manager have been subjected for centuries 
to a special and grave temptation. The ordi- 
nary merchant deals with other merchants — 
his equals in business skill. The publisher 
and the theatrical manager deal with what 



n6 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

amounts to a race of children, of whom even 
arch-angels could not refrain from taking ad- 
vantage. 

When the democratisation of literature se- 
riously set in, it inevitably grew plain that the 
publisher and the theatrical manager had very 
humanly been giving way to the temptation 
with which heaven in her infinite wisdom had 
pleased to afflict them, — and the Society of 
Authors came into being. A natural conse- 
quence of the general awakening was the self- 
invention of the literary agent. The Society 
of Authors, against immense obstacles, has 
performed wonders in the economic education 
of the creative artist, and therefore in the im- 
provement of letters. The literary agent, 
against obstacles still more immense, has car- 
ried out the details of the revolution. The 
outcry — partly sentimental, partly snobbish, 
but mainly interested — was at first tremen- 
dous against these meddlers who would de- 
stroy the charming personal relations that 
used to exist between, for example, the author 
and the publisher. (The less said about those 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 117 

charming personal relations the better. Doc- 
uments exist.) But the main battle is now 
over, and every one concerned is beautifully 
aware who holds the field. Though much re- 
mains to be done, much has been done; and 
to-day the creative artist who, conscious of 
inability to transact his own affairs efficiently, 
does not obtain efficient advice and help 
therein, stands in his own light both as an 
artist and as a man, and is a reactionary force. 
He owes the practice of elementary common 
sense to himself, to his work, and to his pro- 
fession at large. 

IV 

The same dilettante spirit which refuses to 
see the connection between art and money has 
also a tendency to repudiate the world of men 
at large, as being unfit for the habitation of 
artists. This is a still more serious error of 
attitude — especially in a storyteller. No 
artist k likely to be entirely admirable who 
is not a man before he is an artist. The no- 
tion that art is first and the rest of the uni- 



n8 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

verse nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity 
and futility in art. The artist who is too sen- 
sitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is 
thereby too sensitive for his vocation, and fit 
only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work 
of artists less sensitive than himself. 

The classic modern example of the tragedy 
of the artist who repudiates the world is Flau- 
bert. At an early age Flaubert convinced him- 
self that he had no use for the world of men. 
He demanded to be left in solitude and tran- 
quillity. The morbid streak in his constitu- 
tion grew rapidly under the fostering influ- 
ences of peace and tranquillity. He was bril- 
liantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old 
man of twenty-two, mourning over the van- 
ished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to 
perfection. Only when he was travelling (as, 
for example, in Egypt) do his letters lose for 
a time their distemper. His love-letters are 
often ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt 
by the crass provincialism of the refined and 
cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman 
difficult to handle and indeed a Tartar in ego- 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 119 

tism, but as the recipient of Flaubert's love- 
letters she must win universal sympathy. 

Full of a grievance against the whole mod- 
ern planet, Flaubert turned passionately to an- 
cient times (in which he would have been 
equally unhappy had he lived in them), and 
hoped to resurrect beauty when he had failed 
to see it round about him. Whether or not he 
did resurrect beauty is a point which the pres- 
ent age is now deciding. His fictions of mod- 
ern life undoubtedly suffer from his detesta- 
tion of the material; but considering his man- 
ner of existence it is marvellous that he should 
have been able to accomplish any of them, 
except Un Coeur Simple. The final one, 
Douvard et Pecuchet, shows the lack of the 
sense of reality which must be the inevitable 
sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism 
without conviction. No such characters as 
Bouvard and Pecuchet could ever have existed 
outside Flaubert's brain, and the reader's re- 
sultant impression is that the author has 
ruined a central idea which was well suited 
for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands 



120 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

of a French Swift. But the spectacle of Flau- 
bert writing in mots justes a grand larkish ex- 
travaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy. 

There are many sub-Flauberts rife in Lon- 
don. They are usually more critical than 
creative, but their influence upon creators, 
and especially the younger creators, is not 
negligible. Their aim in preciosity would 
seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from 
the world. They are forever being surprised 
and hurt by the crudity and coarseness of hu- 
man nature, and forever bracing themselves 
to be not as others are. They would have in- 
curred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just 
discipline for them would be that they should 
be cross-examined by the great bully in pres- 
ence of a jury of butchers and sentenced ac- 
cordingly. The morbid Flaubertian shrink- 
ing from reality is to be found to-day even in 
relatively robust minds. I was recently at a 
provincial cinema, and witnessed on the screen 
with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama 
entitled " Gold is not All." My friend, who 
combines the callings of engineer and general 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 121 

adventurer with that of serving his country, 
leaned over to me in the darkness amid the 
violent applause, and said : " You know, this 
kind of thing always makes me ashamed of 
human nature." I answered him as Johnson- 
ially as the circumstances would allow. Had 
he lived to the age of fifty so blind that it 
needed a cinema audience to show him what 
the general level of human nature really is? 
Nobody has any right to be ashamed of human 
nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother? Is 
one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolu- 
tion? Human nature is. And the more 
deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, 
absorbs that supreme fact into his brain, the 
better for his work. 

There is a numerous band of persons in 
London — and the novelist and dramatist are 
not infrequently drawn into their circle — who 
spend so much time and emotion in practising 
the rites of the religion of art that they be- 
come incapable of real existence. Each is a 
Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion on Leon 
Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, 



122 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James 
Stephens, E. A. Rickards, Richard Strauss, 
Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without 
value, and their genuine feverish morbid inter- 
est in art has its usefulness ; but they know no 
more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a 
cushion. They never approach normal life. 
They scorn it. They have a horror of it. They 
class politics with the differential calculus. 
They have heard of Lloyd George, the rise 
in the price of commodities, and the eternal 
enigma, what is a sardine; but only because 
they must open a newspaper to look at the ad- 
vertisements and announcements relating to 
the arts. The occasional frequenting of this 
circle may not be disadvantageous to the crea- 
tive artist. But let him keep himself inoc- 
ulated against its disease by constant steady 
plunges into the cold sea of the general na- 
tional life. Let him mingle with the public, 
for God's sake! No phenomenon on this 
wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet 
for the artist's shrinking scorn. And the 
average man, as to whom the artist's ignorance 



ARTIST AND PUBLIC 123 

is often astounding, must forever constitute 
the main part of the material in which he 
works. 

Above all, let not the creative artist sup- 
pose that the antidote to the circle of dilettan- 
tism is the circle of social reform. It is not. 
I referred in the first chapter to the prevalent 
illusion that the republic has just now arrived 
at a crisis, and that if something is not im- 
mediately done disaster will soon be upon us. 
This is the illusion to which the circle of so- 
cial reforms is naturally prone, and it is an 
illusion against which the common sense of 
the creative artist must mightily protest. The 
world is, without doubt, a very bad world; 
but it is also a very good world. The func- 
tion of the artist is certainly concerned more 
with what is than with what ought to be. 
When all necessary reform has been accom- 
plished our perfected planet will be stone-cold. 
Until then the artist's affair is to keep his 
balance amid warring points of view, and in 
the main to record and enjoy what is. . . . 
But is not the Minimum Wage Bill urgent? 



124 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 

But when the minimum wage is as trite as the 
jury-system, the urgency of reform will still 
be tempting the artist too far out of his true 
path. And the artist who yields is lost. 






